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PDF to Text Converter

Pull the text out of a PDF as plain text. Free, and runs entirely in your browser — nothing you enter is uploaded, stored or sent to a server.

About PDF to Text

The text of a PDF, as plain text. What comes out is what the file actually contains, which is worth being precise about: a PDF does not store sentences, it stores glyphs with coordinates. Where a paragraph ends, where a word breaks, and whether two columns are two columns are all inferred from position afterwards.

A scan will produce nothing, and that is the correct answer. A scanned page is a photograph of words with no text behind it, so there is nothing to extract. When that happens the result says so rather than returning an empty file without explanation — the OCR tool is what reads those.

Three layouts, because the right one depends on what happens next. Paragraphs are for reading and for feeding to something that expects prose. One line per line preserves the page's own line breaks, which matters for code listings and tables. Raw text runs is the unreassembled stream, which is what you want when you are debugging why the other two came out strangely.

Where it helps

  • Reassembles paragraphs from the position of each text run rather than dumping fragments.
  • Says plainly when a document has no text layer, instead of returning an empty file.
  • Page markers make it clear which page a passage came from.
  • Output is offered as a .txt download and as copyable text.
  • The document stays in your browser.

Limits

  • A scan has no text to extract — that is a job for OCR, not for this.
  • Two-column layouts are the hard case: the columns can interleave, because the text runs are stored in drawing order rather than in reading order.
  • Tables lose their structure; the Extract Tables job is a different problem and a different tool.
  • Ligatures, soft hyphens and unusual encodings can produce odd characters, depending on how the PDF's fonts were embedded.
  • Text drawn as vector outlines — common in logos and in some export pipelines — is not text and will not appear.

Frequently asked questions

Why did I get nothing back?

Almost certainly a scan: the page is an image, and there is no text layer beneath it. Run the OCR tool first, which recognises the words and writes an invisible text layer into the file, and then this will read it.

Why is the text in the wrong order?

Because PDF stores drawing operations, not reading order, and a two-column page is often drawn column by column — or worse, line by line across both. The paragraph grouping copes with most single-column documents and cannot reliably rescue a complex layout.

Where did the hyphens go?

Words broken across a line end are left as the file has them. A PDF rarely marks the difference between a hyphen that belongs to the word and one added for the line break, so joining them automatically would corrupt genuine hyphenation.

Can I get the tables out?

Not as tables. This produces text; a table needs its columns detected and the cells kept apart, which is what the PDF to Excel conversion does.

Related tools

  • OCR PDF — Read the text off a scanned PDF
  • PDF to Word — Turn a PDF into an editable .docx that keeps its layout
  • PDF to Excel — Pull a PDF's tables into a .xlsx workbook that keeps their formatting
  • PDF Viewer — Read, search and inspect a PDF without leaving the browser
  • Icon Font Generator — Build a web font from SVG icons or an SVG font
  • Image Converter — Convert between PNG, JPEG, JFIF, WebP, GIF, HEIC and SVG

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